Ultimately it doesn't quite work, but along the way it is easy to be somewhat sucked in, especially by Eva Green's suicidal artist and Sam Riley's emotionally shattered dreamer

| Nov 7, 2009

Franklyn is wonky and self-defeating: there are lots of gauche moments. Still, it's entertaining, and commendable for its strangeness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 6, 2009

Franklyn is puzzling in a way some may think tiresome and others intriguing. Gerald McMorrow, whose first feature this is, has talent, but just as he starts tying up the loose ends, the film unravels.

| Mar 6, 2009

If ambition and flair were the only hallmarks of a five-star film then Franklyn would be top of the class.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2009

Look past the odd shortcoming in the storytelling, and there's a brave movie here, one that's prepared to tackle some weighty issues about religion and obsession.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2009

Marks McMorrow as a director to watch, one unafraid of taking risks and going against the grain of the British film industry. It's not for everyone, but surrender to the limitless ambition and off-kilter tone and it's an engaging 100 minutes.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

An admirably non-formulaic drama, which manages to reconcile the opposed British film traditions of contemporary, realistic, low-key character drama with eccentric, flamboyant, Gothic fantasy. It certainly marks out McMorrow as a talent to watch.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2009

'Franklyn' has conceptual boldness and visual imagination that set it apart from the pack.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Feb 27, 2009

McMorrow's ideas may be too damn bold and expansive for Franklyn to succeed on every level, but it's a striking debut from a writer-director unafraid to reach as high as he can.

| Feb 27, 2009

It's a convoluted piece of storytelling that repays more on a visual level than on a logical one. But you can't fault its ambition and imagination.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2009

He is aiming high. And yet, to use a recondite and specialist critical term, this film is massively up itself.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 27, 2009

The spiralling plot lines slowly weave together with real dexterity, resulting in a payoff that's as unexpected as it is satisfying. A cracking sci-fi brainteaser.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

The attempts to compress so many themes into such a short space of time end up making Franklyn seem like it's leapt from the imagination of Garth Marenghi. Ultimately, McMorrow's over-ambitious debut is a beautiful mess.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 27, 2009

You have to give the debut director his due for an absurdly ambitious attempt to do something genuinely different in an age cursed with tired formula and dollar-obsessed convention.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 27, 2009

Frustrating. Not as clever as it thinks it is, but often far better looking than you'd expect. You have to laud McMorrow for a brazen Brit debut that isn't either A) a horror or B) takes place in a gang.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2009

This bold and complex British fantasy-drama is an impressive debut for writerdirector Gerald McMorrow.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2009

Franklyn is an ambitious sci-fi film that squeezes every penny from its 6m budget and throws it onto the screen to create a terrific futuristic cityscape. Kudos for that, yet no amount of good looks can hide the fact it's almost unwatchable.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 27, 2009

What is real, what is fiction and why should I care? That is what you will be asking yourself for the first 70 minutes of this strange film.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 27, 2009

It takes a quarter of the movie's duration to start detecting its drift, another quarter to start caring. The fantastications have a stronger wallop than the realism.

| Feb 27, 2009

Allow that director Gerald McMorrow's feature debut shows ambition in fusing psychodrama, fantasy and metropolitan romance. Sadly, coherence and comprehensibility have been left for dead.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 27, 2009